Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel

by Rivka Galchen

  I later lay around in that living room for what seemed like hours, waiting for someone—anyone—to pass through. But no stirrings. I felt that if I couldn’t get into a terrible argument I might have to shred reams of paper into very, very tiny pieces. And I hate that feeling, of having a feeling within me that just vibrates but that has nowhere to go, like sound in a vacuum, never being received. Then I suffer the self-hatred of having allowed that undesired feeling to pile up, so that adds another layer of ugliness.

  In the kitchen I found a tin of butter cookies, some with crystallized sugar atop, crystallized in a way that made me feel, by comparison, hazy and unresolved. I ate many of the cookies. Then overfull, and as if half the cookies were still in my esophagus waiting patiently to become part of me, I stared at the ceiling of the kitchen. It was painted in drips and drabbles—“spackled,” I think is the word, the real word, not just Rema’s riff on “speckled”—and the shapes that normally morph and merge out upon the random pattern of such a ceiling did not morph and merge for me as I sat there, though I waited for them to do so, even just playfully, but they didn’t, which made it seem as if I’d become the worst kind of literalist and could no longer be startled past the surface of things. As if I really believed in a world where Tzvi didn’t know about Rema, a world where people, oddly enough, meant just what they said.

  30. An ersatz return

  Did I think of going home? I thought of going home. Did I go to the coffee shop and stare too much at the Rema-like waitress? I did. After all, in the aftermath of Rema’s disappearance, it had been Tzvi’s work that had directed me to Argentina in the first place. And actually, it was Rema who, in the aftermath of the beautiful ordinariness of our days, had sent me, as a corrective of sorts, to Tzvi Gal-Chen. Now I suspected the circle of referents might be meaningless. Or at least unsolvable, despite my turning round them again and again. Why had I automatically cast Tzvi in the role of heroic leader? Why had I expected him to tell me what to do next? I could see that he was relevant to my mystery, perhaps even central, yes, but that didn’t mean he was necessarily, say, good. Maybe his work was important, even while he himself was not. Or so I tried to reason, through seven coffees, eleven cookies, and two rounds of toast with marmalade. It was imperative, I eventually decided, that I undertake a more thorough study of Tzvi’s work. Regardless of what he had written in his e-mail. His research—I had just skated on the surface of those words, had turned for help prematurely. Surely, even on my own, I could yield more clues than I had so far. And what with the Lola-arranged meteorological labor that lay on my horizon, I needed to grow more fluent with meteorological vocabulary. Tzvi’s abrupt dismissal of me only emphasized the relevance and import of the work, I decided, as I left a sizable tip and wrote xoxoxo on the merchant receipt.

  With impressive resolve, I headed back to Magda’s home, to Tzvi’s research. I really was ready to go straight to work.

  But outside Magda’s home I saw a woman. Without urgency, ascending like a lava lamp bubble, a tamped thought: she looks just like Rema. Far more so than even the waitress. This woman was just sitting on the front step, her feet turned inward, elbows on knees, chin in hands, fringe of cornsilk blonde hair hanging over dove dark eyes. Next to her a dog. But not the small nervous dog from New York. Instead Killer, the magnified version of that orphaned dog.

  I stood dead still, considered turning and never returning. Why was I instinctually afraid of her? Why had I automatically cast her into the simple role of antagonist? If my casting was so off to begin with, then my hopeless forecasting, wasn’t that wrong too? She looked so forlorn and pretty.

  The simulacrum—not aware of me—then moved her arms. She crossed them over and held on to opposite elbows as if she were cold. This flattened out her upper arm—pressing it against her side—made her arm look larger and also exaggerated its shape, distorting it, funhouse mirroring a form that I love, an ideal form, a just-so curve. This woman was definitely not as pretty as my Rema, not, at least, with her arm all flattened out that way, looking chubby. And that tincture of unattractiveness—well, it made the simulacrum seem to me suddenly harmless.

  I stepped forward, into the woman’s view, and said, with an admirable affect of nonchalance, “Isn’t that the wrong puppy?”

  Before I knew anything, she was holding on to me, and had her arms around me at the shoulders, and her cheek against my cheek, and there was that smell of grass in her hair, which really made me see in blurred triplicate, and then she was kissing my face, the manys of her, and to be perfectly honest this was all reminding me far too acutely of Rema (I felt her teeth on my cheek), of my Rema of the pecans and tea topiaries and foreign newspapers, and frankly it was all making me really too sad. I didn’t like feeling sad, only perverse people like to feel sad—I hadn’t been feeling sad, I had put that off for more important emotions—I wanted to push that woman off of me but couldn’t because I felt like I’d lost control over my limbs, as if they were someone else’s.

  31. A call not for me

  She was kissing me; then when I opened my eyes a moment I saw, in a sideways glance, Magda. It was strange to be seen kissing; it was a very not-me situation in which to be.

  “Rema!” came Magda’s voice. “Phone call!”

  Not a single muscle of the simulacrum responded to the sound of Magda’s voice.

  “I’m coming,” I called out, willfully misunderstanding whom Magda was addressing.

  “I was having so much fear,” the simulacrum said, kissing my eyelids—and I couldn’t help but think about the eyelid kissing, and how this is a thing Rema always liked to do, and though I understand that eyelid kissing is a fairly standard part of any amatory repertoire, I remember how it really needled me at the beginning, needled me for being a sort of learned behavior, which therefore pointed to that whole world that was Rema before I knew her, and pointed to all those people who were not me who had gone into the creation of her as she was, and—well, in that way she was like some alien sedentary rock formation, some meteor fallen to my planet, and it seemed a violation of me to have no choice but to love some charred castaway, with all its strata—I guess I am very jealous and possessive—I just found it very difficult those moments, like eyelid kissing, when I couldn’t help but perceive her duplicity, her triplicity. She took firm hold of my wrist. “I started by writing down a long list of mean things to say to you, but—”

  “It’s rude to Magda—”

  “And I almost thought this was just an ordinary fight we were having, and I went through in my mind all the people who are more nice to me than you are, because many people are very nice to me, but then—”

  “You can’t be nice to Magda only when it’s convenient for you,” I said to her. “And it’s not right to treat people as interchangeable, to replace one for another however and whenever makes you feel okay—” I don’t know why I was saying all those things. I definitely wasn’t thinking about my own behavior with other women. But as I said those random things, I was pushing that woman away from me—which was easy because she’s smaller than me—and I turned to head into the home, and I think the simulacrum started shouting at me. But I am the kind of man who treats mothers very well. I wasn’t going to pretend that I hadn’t heard Magda calling to us. I don’t know if I believe that our relationships with our parents establish patterns we are doomed to repeat and repeat but—I am surprised that I was not more anxious about marrying a woman who very well may have just abandoned her parents. For all I knew Rema had misrepresented and cheaply blamed this beautiful mother whose only fault may have been accurately perceiving the ugly truth—even with little information—about the rude American whom Rema had chosen to marry before she had chosen to marry me. I should at least have learned more about how it had come to be that Rema had abandoned her mother, before I asked her to marry—and hopefully not abandon—me. But I saw Rema all prismatically, all fractured and reconstituted as if seen in the valley of an unshined silver spoon, and actually I’m
glad love does that, I shouldn’t complain about love, or love’s perspective—distorted or no, to feel superior to it would be wrong, as if there were some better way of seeing.

  32. Measured radiances at various frequencies

  Whoever the caller was had hung up, not waiting for the simulacrum to reach the phone’s cradle. In the kitchen, Magda shruggingly informed us of this, and then the three of us just remained there, leaning against the kitchen counter, with nothing to say. Killer slurpled at her water bowl, then lay down, head between paws. She raised her gaze to us humans; we were in a row; I was in the middle.

  “She’s with a friend,” the simulacrum said suddenly but without looking at anyone. “If you’re wondering where the dog is. I left her with a friend from work.”

  “A dog,” Magda echoed.

  “Friend from work,” I repeated.

  Then another bruisy quiet, in which I felt my feet swelling, my ears growing, my vertebrae pressing down upon the cartilaginous disks betwixt and between, myself growing just shorter enough, just slow enough, to invoke a vaguest unsettlement, of everything, the whole world, looking a little bit off, a little too large.

  “All for whores?” Magda erupted cheerily.

  Turning toward the simulacrum as if I kind of knew her—and I did kind of know her, we had spent a couple of rather intense days together—I whispered, “Whores?”

  “And Nescafé?” Magda added to my back.

  “Alpha,” the simulacrum enunciated to me—I watched her lips—in a cold, dry voice. “Alpha. Whore. Rays.”

  Was this a meteorological term? A military code?

  Magda pulled down a package of cookies. She set to boil the teakettle, whose sound I had already, so quickly, become familiar with, although it was an electric teakettle, so instead of a certain trembling there’s a more cavernous gentle rumbling sound, and one waits expectantly for the understated click that means the thermostat has been thrown and the water is boiled, though electric-teakettled water is never hot enough for me, never as hot as from boiling on the stove, though I know that it’s impossible that it’s not hot enough, I know that all boiled water should be, barring major atmospheric differences, equally hot.

  “Go sit in the living room,” Magda said, shooing us off like children. “I’ll bring.”

  We didn’t go. Were we both listening to that sound?

  Killer rose to her paws and loped out.

  “El es mi esposo,” the simulacrum burst out in Spanish with a nervous laugh and a shrug of the shoulders. “Esposo” meaning “handcuff.” But also “husband.” Which is, I assume, what she meant.

  “Who is?” Magda asked.

  With a head tilt, the simulacrum indicated me. But she did not look at or touch me. The real Rema: having kept a secret from her mother for so many years, she wouldn’t have hastily disclosed it so gracelessly.

  “Him?” Magda said. “This man?” she added, pointing, as if I were just a statue. “Your lover I thought maybe he was.”

  “No,” the simulacrum de-affirmed. “Not my lover. My husband.”

  “Those terms,” I said in English. “They’re nonexclusionary. They overlap. Often substantially.”

  The teakettle clicked gently. No one moved. Magda said, “It is like I am not hearing well?”

  What surprised me during all of this was that Magda—and at this thought I couldn’t help but picture her uterus—showed no signs of suspicion toward this false child, this woman whom she had never borne. I had overestimated Magda’s ability to account for the redshift of her own desires, to account for Dopplerganger effect. I had miscalculated the internal error of the other observer I was observing; I should have known that a mother who has not seen her daughter for years, who so desperately wants to see her, well, one could put Kim Novak in front of her and she would likely “recognize” her as her daughter, and it would all feel very right, and very profound, when really all that was being recognized would be a sense of recognition unhinged from its source, a misinterpretation of data, a forcing of facts into a model they didn’t match. “I don’t understand,” Magda continued as if I weren’t there. “Are you saying that you are married to the meteorologist?”

  And I—I thought of a fork tine vanishing into lentils.

  “Meteorologist?” the simulacrum echoed.

  “What happened to the psychoanalyst?” Magda asked.

  I was craving—craving instant coffee.

  “Are you talking about Tzvi Gal-Chen?” the simulacrum said to Magda, alarmed. And then the simulacrum actually turned to me, looked at me, took hold of my wrist—and that made all the vastly spaced particles of me seem to crowd together—and she loud-whispered at me: “You told her about Tzvi Gal-Chen?”

  “Of course I didn’t tell her about Tzvi Gal-Chen,” I murmured in a tense voice that, when it returned to my ears, sounded too high-pitched.

  “What,” Magda asked, “is chewy galleon?”

  “I’m absolutely not in contact with him,” I announced firmly to nobody.

  More noncommunicative communication went on. To be honest I could no longer really listen, my head filling with the fluttering as if of a thousand mothers, or moths, emerging from an old winter coat not pulled out of a closet for years; I began to think of stepping out to return, again, for the nth time, to the coffee shop, where I could have a properly hot coffee and some cookies and a look at the pretty waitress. But I did not leave. “Doesn’t she look strange to you?” I said, finally breaking into the blue, or really white, noise and speaking directly to Magda and only to Magda and not feeling bad about turning my back on that other woman.

  “No,” Magda said, reaching her hand past me, toward that woman. “I like the hair, Rema.” I found myself imprisoned behind Magda’s arm. “The color—it’s more natural than your natural color.”

  The simulacrum flinched, as if it were winter and sparks had flown between them. But it wasn’t winter, not there, anyway; it was warm outside, and there was a real chance that someone was going to cry, or snap, that was the feeling I had, and that sort of thing takes up so much space in a room that I thought that I should leave instead of suffocate, but I didn’t know how to exit gracefully—leaving in the middle of a movie is an offense to the director, though I’m not sure, analogously, who was the director I was worried about offending—but then, thank God, or at least thanks to the most powerful institution of which I know, my phone rang, after which point the rudeness of staying surely outweighed the rudeness of stepping out, so I ducked under Magda’s arm and headed out the front door.

  33. Synoptic meteorology

  Isn’t it strange how conveniently timed my incoming phone calls were?

  But isn’t it also strange that the Gospel According to Matthew ends with Jesus on the cross saying, Father, Father, why have you forsaken me? Who could have foreseen that ending?

  “Hi, this is Lola?” a voice said.

  I was still stepping out front, to the courtyard full of dusty bougainvillea. “Who?”

  “Lola?”

  “No, I’m not Lola. Leo here.”

  “Leo? This is Lola. I’m calling for Arthur. Arthur Corning. About the job in the South.”

  “Arthur?”

  “Yes. Arthur. Twenty-seven. Bowdoin College. Recreational ice climber? We talked about wounds?”

  Then I finally, sun heating my back, relaxed enough to recognize that sensually quavering voice. The simulacrum’s appearance must have temporarily blotted out my imagined image of Lola from the Royal Academy. “Oh,” I said, my palms beginning to sweat as random sensuality carbonated up to my cortex. “Yes. That’s me. Arthur.”

  Why did I say that? Say that I was Arthur when I was not? Well, the name was bestowed upon me, I did not come up with it myself. I had to be open to the disguised ways in which progress, clues, might present themselves to me. Lola and I had established a real connection; it would have been foolish to disregard that; that personal connection was what mattered; maybe paperwork had been randomly mixe
d up, but maybe it had been randomly mixed up on purpose; maybe this would lead nowhere, this name, but I couldn’t reject it out of hand just because I remained ignorant of the details behind it, and just because I was, in a sense, lying.

  “We want to offer it to you,” Lola silked. “That position. Down South.” Lola’s words sounded dirty to me. I don’t believe this was just because I suddenly imagined that she imagined me as a sexy, well-built, young ice climber. Nor do I believe those words sounded dirty because I was projecting my own anxieties—or hopes—about what likely never happened between Rema and the dog man, or Rema and Anatole, or Rema and no one. I think it was just overstimulation; it was just as if I had been watching night skies and a new planet had swum into my ken, and a new planet naturally throws off one’s calculations about the movements of all the other celestial bodies, and that made me think again of the Dog Star, Sirius, that had appeared to be just one star but was later discovered to be two, or maybe even three, and when they learned that, that must have changed everything, all the calculations. My mind was running like that.

  “You were very sweet the other day,” Lola continued. “I was feeling very—”

  “Can you review again for me the exact details of the job?” I said. I wasn’t trying to be mean, cutting her off just as she began speaking about her feelings. I wasn’t actually developing the detachment of a disordered psychotic—I just wanted to concentrate, to stick to the business at hand.